Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past?

The first time I entered ChatRoulette-a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world-I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it "the Holy Grail of all Internet fun." Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive-one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

Read more: Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/media/63663/##ixzz0ez243bKX

Original Source: Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past?